Am I mad?
I see almost everything said by other people, all other people, as wrong, being based on ideas that I see as myths, even or especially, with those who I agree with in general emotional terms.
What does that say about what I believe or propose?
Is there some hidden esoteric stream of thought that enlightens only me, or only a few like me?
This has to be at least extremely unlikely.
One simple possibility is that I am insane, & that I live inside my psychoses. That is entirely possible & I would have no way of knowing or finding a way out of my private parallel universe. No Turing test for me, that assumes an objective observer. For that I would have to seek outside thoughts, maybe yours.
Another possibility is that we all live within our personal psychoses, which vary from each other. I could live with that. Individual parallel universes.
I will do my very best to explain one of my bases, one of my psychoses. There are others, economics, religiosity that will have to wait for other days, but first & foremost, that there was, historically at least, the basis in Australia of what would have maybe passed as a democracy, even given the racist colonial nature of the national formation, that given education & enlightenment, the non-Indigenous people of Australia, the descendants of the settlers, the colonialists, the invaders, together will all those who came later, such as myself, would come to recognise the savage brutality that our ancestors imposed on the Indigenous people that they encountered & massacred.
That from this racist origin there emerged a white (western) working class exploiting the Indigenous people to the same extent as the ruling colonist classes & that this working class fighting against their oppression by the colonial government who saw them as little different from the Indigenous people set up unions & that some politicians of the time saw these unions as beneficial to their ambitions.
Thus was the Australian Labor Party formed, as racist as anyone in the country, as misogynist as anyone in the world.
As a personal admission, claim, I have a huge respect for the work of my 3rd cousin (once removed) Henry Lawson who, as a socialist was apparently as racist as anyone, & presumably a supporter of the early Labor Party in whatever guise they presented themselves. Henry after all, published his work in a magazine, the Bulletin, with the banner “Australia for the White Man”, I don’t know when, if ever, they removed it.
So returning to the Australian Labor Party, these racist people purporting to represent Australian workers continued on their merry, or not so merry way through religious schisms (more myths) to 1972 when they finally, after many years “in the wilderness” won government under Gough Whitlam.
This Whitlam government attempted to bring Australia back into the modernity, the post war world that had established National Health & national everything in the parent nation, the ‘mother country’, the UK.
Tragically, for whatever reasons, over-eagerness, incompetence, whatever, they crashed rather than crashing through, & they were ousted in a bloodless coup by the UK & US that installed their then opposition, the Liberal Party, under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser.
That point, 11 Nov 1975, proved to be the end of Parliamentary opposition in Australia, that had previously assumed that political opposition, “His or Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” & hence the end of what had been at least fondly imagined as democracy in Australia.
From that point on this previously presumed democracy has not existed.
From then, or at least since 5 March 1983 when the Australian Labor Party was elected to government to replace the coup makers or acceptors, this party accepted their place in the scheme of things, recognised that everything that Gough Whitlam had stood for was no longer desirable or possible to attain, so they elected a party led by Neoliberals, or as they then presented themselves “Economic Rationalists”.
These Economic Rationalists, Bob Hawke & Paul Keating, the darlings of Australian Labor introduced Australia to Neoliberalism, that ideology formulated by fascists in Austria pre-war which had been previously insinuated into the American left by Jimmy Carter & the UK by James Callaghan. [See the establishment of the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia in 1943 leading to all the other similarly fascist Institutes around the world later, in Uk the Institute of Economic Affairs, in the US, you name it, it is neoliberal]
Bob Hawke, who had previously been the Secretary of the Australian Congress of Trade Unions, the very voice of the people, brought in the Accords, by which the unions had to abide by the government, their traditional enemies, thus deliberately setting in motion the process of wage suppression that has resulted in wage stagnation that so oppresses us now, 40 years later.
His Treasurer, Paul Keating, following the same ideological urge, started privatising, handing over of government’s, the Australian People’s assets, to the private sector, corporations, oligarchs. To make whatever profits they could from them before abandoning them to be paid out by public funds, to the greater benefit of the private sector & the detriment of us, the people.
From that point on, the natural believers in this ideology, the so called Liberals, took these actions & capitalised on them, made money from them. The weasel John Winston Howard, copying Margaret Thatcher in her ignorant arrogance, adopted the Neoliberals’ concept of their innate superiority over the people, they were wealthier, therefore they were superior. This went along with the Neoliberals’ ideology that the “worthy” ie. those already wealthy, deserved to have their wealth further enhanced by government, or any means possible, & that the unworthy, the poor, needed to be further oppressed for the benefit of the worthy.
This was the perfect vehicle for the oligarchs, allowing them to purchase political parties, hence government & power. They donated to the neoliberal politicians & parties, ALP & LNP, which then passed legislation which resulted in the feeding of vast amounts of public money back to the oligarchs. [There is a major problem for a venal politician seeking wealth, the government has no money, but they create all of it for the legislated benefit of the nation, & there are many protections in place to prevent them feeding it to themselves. Hence corrupt schemes like the Liberals’ Parakeelia rort by which they harvested public expenses paid to politicians to feed back to the party].
This effective ownership of the parties gave the oligarchs power over the government, it didn’t matter which one, it is always one of two possibilities, & they own them both. The parties are effectively similar, one pretends to be civil & one doesn’t, but neither are. Any apparent difference between the parties is just a smoke & mirrors exercise by the mainstream media, also owned or heavily influenced by the oligarchs, to give the false impression of an opposition between them to obscure the reality of the duopoly which has existed for 40 years.
It is no longer a case of “whoever you vote for, a politician always wins”, it is now “whoever you vote for makes no difference of any kind, a neoliberal politician representing the corporate oligarch thugs to enrich then & oppress the people always wins”.
You may think that Liberals are the bad guys & Labor the good guys, which is fine as a myth, a true believer’s dogma, & as long as you only hear Labor’s words you can keep pretending that it is so, but should you be silly enough to ignore the words & look at what Labor has actually done, or not done, & then try to form a thesis of why they might have acted in the way they did, then the whole edifice collapses. Labor eventually got the Treasury seats again & there have been changes, but we have yet to see any effect from them. We saw what happened to Labor ex-PM Kevin Rudd who had half a million signatures for a petition to get a commission to look into Murdoch in Australia, he was given, & accepted, the job of Ambassador to Rupert where he can say or do nothing, in his gilded cage in Washington DC. Or maybe the Federal Crime & Corruption Commission that they joined with the Liberals in opposing, but we have yet to see any results upon which to judge it. My prophesy from back before the 2019 election was that if Labor were to be elected, that nothing other than token changes would happen, that they would undo none of the police state laws that they had supported the Liberals to pass when Labor was the supposed opposition, they would just keep the seats warm until the oligarch’s A Team, the LNP got back into the seats again & reverted to the type that we saw in 2013-. Was I, am I, wrong?
Now, to return to the original theme, my putative insanity, I can see all this as clear as day, & nothing has happened in the time that I have seen it, since maybe 2015, to disprove it. I have Labor friends who sometimes come close, just getting a glimpse of it, before falling back on optimism, somehow after 40 years of this working for them they are going to change to be more like what they were that got them thrown out on their necks in 1975. Yeah, Nah.
This is just one of the ways in which my understanding of life is at variance with that of most everybody else. There is almost nothing of any substance that I would agree with the rest of the world about, all religions are obviously patently absurd, the economics that drives everything is a nonsense, is that insanity?
